Left-Libertarianism: A Primer Peter Vallentyne in Left Libertarianism and Its Critics: The Contemporary Debate , edited by Peter Vallentyne and Hillel Steiner (Palgrave Publishers Ltd., 2000): 1-20. 1. INTRODUCTION Left-libertarian theories of justice hold that agents are full self-owners and that natural resources are owned in some egalitarian manner. Unlike most versions of egalitarianism, left-libertarianism endorses full self-ownership, and thus places specific limits on what others may do to one’s person without one’s permission. Unlike the more familiar right-libertarianism (which also endorses full self-ownership), it holds that natural resources—resources which are not the results of anyone's choices and which are necessary for any form of activity—may be privately appropriated only with the permission of, or with a significant payment to, the members of society. Like right-libertarianism, left-libertarianism holds that the basic rights of individuals are ownership rights. Such rights can endow agents—as liberalism requires—with spheres of personal liberty where they may each pursue their conceptions of “the good life”. Left- libertarianism is promising because it coherently underwrites both some demands of material equality and some limits on the permissible means of promoting this equality. It is promising, that is, because it is a form of liberal egalitarianism. Left-libertarian theories have been propounded for over two centuries. Early exponents of some form of self-ownership combined with some form of egalitarian ownership of natural resources include: Hugo Grotius (1625), Samuel Pufendorf (1672), John Locke (1690), William Ogilvie (1781), Thomas Spence (1793), Thomas Paine (1795), Hippolyte de Colins (1835), François Huet (1853), Patrick E. Dove (1850, 1854), Herbert Spencer (1851), Henry George 1 (1879, 1892), and Léon Walras (1896).1 It is striking how much of the current debate about equality, liberty, and responsibility has already been addressed by these authors. Recent years have witnessed a revival of left-libertarian theorizing. Allan Gibbard (1976), Baruch Brody (1983), James Grunebaum (1987), Hillel Steiner (1994), Philippe Van Parijs (1995), and Michael Otsuka (1998) have each written works (included in whole or in part in this volume) that reflect the general spirit of left-libertarianism. There are many different forms that left-libertarianism can take, and this essay supplies a brief overview of the terrain. 2 2. BACKGROUND We shall focus, as is standard, on left-libertarianism as a theory of justice , where justice is understood to be concerned with legitimate (i.e., morally permissible) coercion. In this sense, an action is unjust if and only if others are morally permitted to coerce one not to perform it. Some just actions may be morally impermissible (e.g., refusing to help an elderly neighbor, where one has a moral obligation to help, but others are not morally permitted to coerce one to help), and (more controversially) some unjust actions may be morally permissible (e.g., stealing a car to save someone’s life). Libertarianism (both left and right) construes basic individual rights as property rights. We shall therefore focus on the ownership of things in the world. Here we must distinguish among beings with moral standing (beings that matter morally for their own sake), natural resources (unproduced resources, such as land, air, water, etc.), and artifacts (products). For simplicity, we shall initially assume that all beings with moral standing are agents (rational choosers), and we shall thus ignore the important and difficult problem of the status of children, 2 fetuses, and animals. Libertarianism (both left and right) is committed to full self-ownership for rational agents. It is less clear how other sorts of being with moral status are to be treated. For simplicity, we shall also begin by assuming that there is only one society (and thus ignore the problems of international boundaries) and only one generation (and thus ignore the problems that arise concerning the preservation of resources for future generations and the private transmission of wealth over generations). In a later section we shall relax these simplifying assumptions, and briefly discuss the issues that thereby arise. 3. FULL SELF-OWNERSHIP Libertarianism (both left and right) holds that all agents are, initially at least (e.g., prior to engaging in any commitments or unjust actions), full self-owners, and that any violation of full self-ownership is unjust. The core idea of full self-ownership is that agents own themselves in just the same way that they can fully own inanimate objects. This maximal private ownership includes (1) full control rights over (power to grant and deny permission for) the use of their persons (e.g., what things are done to them), (2) full rights to transfer the rights they have to others (by sale, rental, gift, or loan), and (3) full payment immunities for the possession and exercise of these rights (ensuring, for example, that the other rights are not merely rented and that taxation is not owed for mere possession or exercise). At the core of full self-ownership are the constraints on how individuals may be used. Killing, torturing, or enslaving innocent individuals without their consent is unjust no matter how effective these actions are as means to equality or other moral goals. More generally, agents have the right to control the use of their person . There are some things (such as physical contact of various sorts) that are unjust when done to an agent without his/her consent, and those very things are just when the agent gives his/her consent. 3 3 It is important to note that the thesis that violations of full self-ownership are unjust is much stronger than the less controversial idea that justice imposes constraints on how individuals may be treated without their permission. First, a constraint—against torture, for example—need not be based on a property right (which includes the power to waive the constraint). It might just be an impersonal constraint on conduct. The libertarian thesis of full self-ownership holds both that it is unjust to treat people in certain ways without their permission, and that it is just to do so with their permission (as long as no other rights are violated in the process). One can endorse the first claim without endorsing the second (viz., by viewing the specified treatment as unjust no matter whether or not the affected agent has consented). Doing this, however, requires rejecting the idea that people have a right to control the use of their person in the specified ways. Second, the assumption that some form of self-ownership imposes some waivable constraints on how one may be treated need not be the assumption that full self-ownership imposes such constraints. Full self-ownership gives agents various control rights over the use of their persons. But it also gives them rights to transfer those rights to others and various payment immunities . One can endorse a partial form of self-ownership (e.g., control rights) without endorsing full self-ownership (e.g. with full transfer rights). More specifically, one objection to full self-ownership concerns voluntary slavery . Full self-ownership includes not only first-order rights of control over the use of one’s person, but also the right (power) to transfer (e.g., by gift or sale) these rights to others. This seems to entail that one has the right to voluntarily enslave oneself, which strikes many as wildly implausible. (Involuntary enslavement, of course, violates full control self-ownership, and is not at issue here.) An important but generally unrecognized response to the objection about voluntary enslavement is that full self-ownership on its own does not entail that voluntary enslavement is 4 permitted by justice. Full self-ownership includes the right to transfer one’s rights over oneself, but it does not ensure that others have the right (power) to acquire these rights. Transfer of rights from one person to another (by exchange or by gift) requires that both that the transferor have the power to transfer the rights and consents to do so and that the transferee has the power to acquire the rights and consents to do so. Full self-ownership is thus compatible with no one having the power to acquire by transfer rights over another person. Full self-ownership ensures that one has the power to renounce (i.e., abandon) one’s rights over oneself (which does not require a recipient), and that one has the power to consensually transfer one’s rights to anyone who has the power to receive them. It does not, however, require that anyone have the power to receive them. That issue concerns the powers that others have with respect to one’s person (viz. the power to acquire rights over one under certain conditions.) Of course, most left-libertarians will hold that all agents initially have these powers to acquire rights over others (as well as over natural resources and artifacts), and so the objection is indeed applicable to most versions of left- libertarianism. The point here is that the legitimacy of voluntary enslavement does not follow from self-ownership alone. 4 Nor is it clear that voluntary enslavement is illegitimate. It will seem so, if one thinks that a main concern of justice is to protect the possession of effective autonomy. On the other hand, if one thinks that a main concern of justice is to protect the exercise of autonomy, it is not. For a well-informed decision to sell oneself into slavery (e.g., for a large sum of money to help one’s needy family) is an exercise of autonomy. Indeed, under desperate conditions it may even represent an extremely important way of exercising one’s autonomy.